Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Yes, we just open-sourced the last year of our lives–all the code, art, and music for CodeCombat–under the MIT and Creative Commons licenses.

“Wait. You’re a for-profit startup, but you’re giving away all of your code? Are you crazy?”

Nope! Closed source may be the choice made by virtually every startup and every game studio, but we believe this is a convention that needs rethinking. CodeCombat is already a community project, with hundreds of players volunteering to create levels, write documentation, help beginners, playtest, and even translate the game into seventeen languages so far. Now the programmers can join the party, too.

Our mission is to teach you to code. Until we have over nine thousand levels taking you all the way from beginner to Bellard, why not jump into a novice-friendly open source project to keep learning? We aren’t just dumping the code out there and calling it a day–we’ve worked hard to make it simple to contribute. You don’t need to know git, you don’t need to have anything installed, and you don’t even need to know how to code to help with some of the issues on our GitHub.

We need your help. Just two months ago, we launched our beta. Two weeks ago, we posted about how 180,000 kids had just played CodeCombat that week. One week ago, we tried a hard developer challenge level, and nearly 10,000 seasoned programmers played–we still haven’t finished responding to everyone who trounced our own algorithm and wanted help finding a programming job. CodeCombat is growing into something bigger than just our game. If you want to write code that will show millions of players how cool programming can be, then click here to become an Archmage. We can’t wait to see what you build.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Greetings from Pencilati Interactive. We are a game art studio founded by a group of veteran artists. We just love the concept of code combat and would like to contribute towards taking its art and animation to the next level. We think there is a lot of scope in developing the look and feel of this game and it would be great fun to explore new concept art and levels here. Please guide us how to get started.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

At the Cueria Law Firm, L.L.C., our personal injury lawyer in New Orleans provides a personal approach to representing those who were hurt in an accident due to someone else’s negligence. With over two decades of experience and proven success in the indus

I am a 10 year old gamer. I will play with you if you say that I can. But if not you will find me in the blog page. I like to play code combat allot. I hope I don't disturb you guys at all. Have fun on code.org. Always believe in yourself. You are awesom

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When we open-sourced everything a month ago, we were nervous. What if no one contributes?, we worried. We had spent a week writing documentation, automating the developer setup, filing easy issues, paring down the repository, and preparing licenses. We wanted to demonstrate that open source should be the default choice for many startups and games, but if we failed, then we would have done the opposite.

We needn't have worried. The CodeCombat Archmages swarmed the GitHub gates, breached the dev setup bug barricade, and presented a plethora of pull requests. Here are the first month stats:

"Okay, sure, that's a lot of contributors, but are they really helping? Those pull requests are probably tiny changes like centering some div. I bet the CodeCombat team is still doing almost all the real work and the open source thing is just for show."

Not convinced by a list of numbers? Good; I wouldn't be, either. Let's dig in and see how much the Archmages have really contributed. Here are the top five open source contributors with links to their commits:

What a crazy weekend! We launched our beta on Friday morning by posting to a few subreddits hoping to pick up a few more interested users who could play through our levels as we started to release new ones with the level editor we just finished. But we were not prepared for how many people would come check it out. We stayed #1 on all three subreddits for over a day, amassing 1466 points, 384 comments, and far too many players for our real-time multiplayer server to handle (forcing us to shut off the multiplayer and all server code synchronization). And that’s all before we were crushed the next day by what appeared to our beleaguered Scott as all of Brazil, or at least every Brazilian on Facebook. (Olá!)

With all the chaos trying to keep the server up and the bugs down, we slept little and prepared for the next day’s Startup School even less. We had been tapped for on-stage Y Combinator office hours with Paul Graham and Sam Altman. We watched a video of previous on-stage YC office hours and concluded that “office hours” really meant “eight minutes of two of the smartest startup guys in the world demolishing your idea in front of 1700 entrepreneurs and a live video stream”.

See the video. Fortunately for us, they liked our startup and were much nicer than we expected. In fact, as we were walking off stage thinking, “Hey, that went well—maybe we’ll get an interview!”—then Paul whispered something to Sam, who nodded, and they called us back.